Elizabeth Gower, Lost to be Found

“Beauty is a concordance and fittingness of a thing to itself and of all its individual parts to themselves and to each other and to the whole, and of that whole to all things.”

Robert Grosseteste, Bishop of Lincoln, 13th Century 1

If the creative process involves the transformation of chaos and flux into order and meaning, making the artist at least momentarily akin to a god; the methods involved in making art can appear to share much with those of the twin demiurges of contemporary visual art: the museum curator and the professional collector. The analogy may seem far fetched, yet the methods employed by any artist would seem to accord well with Joanne Finkelstein’s view of collecting as being an activity of ‘…ordering the disorderly, making intelligible an unruly universe of objects.” 2 Walter Benjamin, in his famous essay ‘Unpacking my Library,’ also identified this tension between order and disorder as part of the symbolic meaning of collecting, but Benjamin goes further, suggesting the secret core of collecting to be an obsessional form of ownership – the knowledge that the object collected is, ‘[locked] within a magic circle…fixed as the final thrill…of acquisition’. 3

But here the analogy of the artist as both collector and curator – producing order from chaos through careful selection and collation - gives way. For there is a world of difference between owning an object or image and its creative transformation into art. It is a difference Melbourne artist Elizabeth Gower tests constantly in her work.

The fact is that neither the collection itself nor its critical analysis (the business of much seventies and eighties art) can constitute ‘art’ – a state which must depend for its being essentially upon the transformative power of imagination. And while this must surely seem a revisionary position, it is one persuasively argued in Gower’s work, which since the early 1970’s has drawn much of its content and form from the world of the everyday - the flotsam and jetsam of ordinary, commercial images and objects; the clamorous material of the consumer world. This is the woman who has photocopy images of clothing once, but no longer, worn by her children. Note: not the clothes, but the images.

Indeed while Elizabeth Gower’s methods may accord with those of the professional collector, her work represents quite a different tack on this link between art - as a process of creative ordering and reflection – and the activity of the collector/curator, as exemplified in the idea of the museum as a repository of items exhaustively catalogued, collated and analysed. 4

For what motivates Gower is ‘the search’. A search built upon the belief that there must be something beyond the ephemeral pleasures and pains of human existence.

The artist’s early work, from her first exhibition in 1975 at the Hawthorn City Gallery to her 1980 exhibition at Christine Abrahams Gallery, 5 was both abstract in form and experimental in construction; with many of the pieces in her first exhibition, for example, taking the form of hangings made from leftover and recycled pieces of canvas. While in formal terms these hangings may have made reference to the early concerns of American artist Frank Stella, the local audience quickly came to see the sculptures of Eva Hesse as a more pertinent reference, particularly through the emphasis in Gower’s works upon translucency, transparency, fragility and impermanence.

Gower’s 1976 exhibition, at the Ewing & George Paton Galleries at Melbourne University, consisted of further transparent hangings constructed of wax paper over paper pulp. As part of this exhibition, the artist showed the first of two installation works comprising several suspended textured and translucent layers of paper and textile veils. The complex associations provoked by these sensual, delicate works led a number of Gower’s audience to see the works as emblematic of the emergence in Australian contemporary art of a specifically feminine visual vocabulary, one capable of effecting radical political and aesthetic change. Indeed, Gower’s choice of materials was championed by these colleagues as being both about the expression of ‘feminine’ qualities as well as a validation of traditionally under-valued feminine ‘handicrafts’ such as sewing and weaving.

Nevertheless, the themes informing any artist’s work are complex and likely to remain resistant to a merely political reading – and indeed there is a danger in over emphasising the feminist concerns of Gower’s art of this period. For while the artist’s choice of fragile materials such as paper may have represented a stand on her part against the domination in local and international contemporary art of the day of a bunch of heroic male painters, it is only part of the story. There were other, equally relevant reasons for the artist’s choice of materials – paper was cheap and available, as was resin (sourced from a local boat builder). And there was already present in these early works the artist’s interest in exploiting the associations evoked by such banal, familiar and domestic materials as newspaper and tissue paper.

Though by the end of the seventies the translucent veil was an established motif within Gower’s art, the artist was largely to put this aside for a nearly a decade before returning to it in the 1990’s. Instead, a trip to Paris in 1980 and a residency in New York in 1981 saw Gower produce a novel ‘quilt’, constructed not from the pre-loved clothes traditionally employed in the making of such items, but from collected and recycled paper packaging. For this work, Gower cut out and collected packages from everyday supermarket consumables, such as toothpaste tube boxes, which were then pasted down to form a collage pattern – resulting in a work in which the repetitive imagery of the consumerised domestic realm is fused with the form of the quilt, traditionally produced through the craft of women (freshly valorised as ‘collectivist’ by the women’s movement).

But if the frame of reference for these works was seen at the time as feminist and anti-consumerist, the signs were already there of the artist’s developing focus upon the activity of collecting itself, as well as upon the form of the collection. Thus the 1977 work, Nylon Pouches Sewn Within Gridded Nylon functions both as a repository – with its pouches containing slivers of newspaper, for example - and as evidence of the collector’s ‘strategy’ – in this case involving the selection of a particular category of consumer goods as perhaps the equivalent of a genus or species of bird or plant.

By the time of Gower’s ‘City Series’, 1983, this shift was evidently well underway. For this series, the artist collected billposters and supermarket hoardings from the streets in her local environment of inner-city Melbourne. These posters – promoting magazines and other consumables and rock n roll gigs - were shredded by the artist (as were millions of documents in the city offices surrounding her) and rearranged as vibrant, energetic collages. The series marked the artist’s return to figuration, not seen since her art school work. Works created at this time incorporate fragments of images and cut up texts (including phrases such as ‘One Stop Shopping’, and ‘Womans Day’), with the words appearing to act as pointers to the ‘real’ world, particularly in being images and brand names of actual consumer items.

Following the completion of the ‘City Series’, Gower and artist partner John R. Neeson moved to Hobart, in order for Gower to take up a position as Lecturer in Painting at the Tasmanian School of Art. The contrast both experienced in this new suburban environment – after years of living in inner-urban Prahran and central Melbourne - was important. Gower describes the surprising experience of receiving her first sales catalogue through her letterbox at this time – and her recognition that this might provide the perfect material with which to follow up the emphasis on consumer culture started in the ‘Quilt’ work of 1978-79.

The series of works produced in Hobart during this period resulted from Gower tracing the outline of objects onto drafting film and then enlarging the images to be painted on canvas. The content of these works was figured in the suburban and personal life of Gower- themes of setting up house, ‘yours and mine’ and consideration of the domestic roles of men and women. The final paintings were based on children’s colouring-in books, ‘lost and found’ puzzles of the ‘Where’s Wally?’ and ‘Can You Find The Cat In This Picture?’ variety. But whilst in Hobart, Gower also began to more systematically collect images of consumer goods, and from this point on both the methods and the ideological and symbolic aspects of the museum and of collecting can be seen to emerge as central concerns within her work. 6 Indeed, all the work which Gower has created subsequent to this period in Hobart, particularly her ‘Chance or Design’, and her later ‘Artefacts from the 20th Century’ and ‘Genera’ series, articulates the artist’s complex and highly-considered understanding of the relationship between the collection and the consumer world as particularly represented in the pages of popular magazines.  

Chantal Georgel’s essay, ‘The Museum as Metaphor in 19th Century France’ 7 explores this connection through research conducted into more than 70 French newspapers and journals published between 1806 and 1914  - all of which contain the word ‘museum’ in their titles. Georgel also identifies a number of periodicals titled ‘magasins’ (department stores). One example cited, ‘The Universal Store, a Monthly Museum of Belle Lettres, of the Arts and Sciences’, (Paris 1860 – 1862), uses both the words ‘musee’ and ‘magasin’. Georgel’s research points out an interesting conflation between the popular press, high art and consumer culture, in which the department store, the popular magazine, and the museum, use identical terms in speaking of the functions of acquisition, accumulation and display. 8

The rhetoric of French magazines such as those cited in Georgel’s study, commonly known as ‘printed museums’, promised an encyclopedia of knowledge devoted to the education of all. The periodic publication of such journals reflected the ambition of the museum to include reference to – literally – all things, through the unceasing accumulation of new information. Similarly the department store can be seen as providing for the pleasure of unceasing material acquisition (consumerism) through the display of new products  - for which there must be inexhaustible demand. For its part, the museum provides for a symbolic display of ownership (by the individual or by the state) of novel, exotic, and remarkable objects (often unaffordable and/or incomprehensible by the common man).

The act of collecting is to appropriate - to make one’s own - not just through possession of the thing itself, but by means of the creation of an order of things: creation through the symbolic arrangement of objects of subjective meaning. The editorials of the ‘museum magazines’ instanced in Georgel’s study proclaimed that purchasers of subscriptions to these magazines would be, in effect, enabled to compile a personal museum through collecting the issues published.

But there is further dimension to the collection. According to Susan Sontag, “to collect is to rescue things, valuable things from neglect, from oblivion. 9 Recycling and collecting go together – one must collect in order to recycle. Gower’s continuing use of paper as a principal medium within her work underscores this ‘twinning’ of the themes of recycling and consumption. Indeed, many of the objects collected by Gower would not ordinarily be regarded as valuable, however it is precisely this rescuing and re-valuing of the commonplace as extraordinary that is the subject of her art. The Genera series, for example, comprises images of office chairs – possibly among the most banal and ubiquitous objects ever manufactured – arranged to form a surprising, exciting and highly animated visual pattern.

Ted Gott, discussing Elizabeth Gower’s 1995 ‘Chance or Design’ series, argues that by presenting images from the natural realm the artist seeks to remind us of the need to conserve the natural world from destruction. Gott quotes Gower herself on this subject as follows, “ …the role of the late 20th century naturalist may no longer be to discover and collate new species but to preserve and record the remaining ones. This inventory could be read as an historical document of a diminishing natural world.’ 10 This idea of the need to conserve the ‘natural world’ continues to be central to the mission of the museum, particularly as it has developed during the 18 th and 19 th centuries (in fact, the idea of the museum as a means of ensuring the conservation of nature can probably be traced back at least as far as Noah’s Ark). 

Then there is the equally venerable history of the museum/collection as a repository for the selected results of God’s finest and most curious handiwork. In this endeavour, the museum seeks to represent, through the collection of examples of every known type of matter, and species and genus of flora and fauna, the ‘totality’ of the natural world. Such a task is, of course, impossible, but has its roots in this same idea of the truly complete collection as being that which would reveal both the mind and method of God. The Medieval mind sees the beauty and complexity of the natural world as a reflection of the transcendent, ideal beauty the source of which is God. Such a view sees the collection as holding a mirror to nature. If the world of consumer objects can, by extension, be seen as representing our new, constructed nature, then are consumer objects equally capable of reflecting the glory of God?

Be this as it may, the ‘Chance or Design’ series of 1995 is the result of Gower’s cutting out and collecting of images drawn from a more conventionalised nature: trees, leaves, birds, and whales. The images were taken by the artist direct from the source in which they were found – as recycled appropriations of works by other, anonymous, artists – for the most part photographers or illustrators. In contradistinction to the permanently unfinished nature of the collection however, these works, once complete, represent totality, closure. No additions can be contemplated, even if further images could be found.

The ‘Chance or Design’ works of 1995 posits that a Creator and not evolution must be responsible for the present nature of the world. For Gower, at this time, nature is too perfect, too beautiful to be the result either of mere chance or evolutionary determinism. As the artist herself put it, in a recent catalogue for her 1995 ‘Chance or Design’ exhibition at the Ian Potter Museum at the University of Melbourne, “…the natural world is a manifestation of precision, order, design, and beauty of such complexity and ingenuity that it could not have come about through millions of chance accidents and random mutations.” 11

Whether or not one believes in a creationist view of the world, indeed whether one believes in God at all, many of us find ourselves asking from time to time the question ‘is this all there is?’ Humans throughout history have tended to ponder and wonder about the possibility of a ‘beyond’, of a higher purpose to life. Elizabeth Gower’s work foregrounds this perennial impulse, particularly through her choice of titles, for example, ‘Lost & Found’, ‘The Transient Nature of Things’, ‘Beyond the Everyday’, ‘Thinking About the Meaning of Life’, ‘Is That All There Is?’ And unfashionable as it may seem in the world of today’s art, it is nevertheless worth recalling that for much of the two previous millennia this was precisely the purpose of art – to express the hankering in humans after a spiritual dimension.

Yet while humanity destroys yet another species of the natural world, we find ourselves creating yet other forms of artificial life 12 and yet other and more varied and ultimately indistinguishable consumer goods. Gower’s shift in 1998 back to a domestic context of consumer marketing takes the form of an investigation of our desire for consumer objects. The ‘Genera’ series, 1998/9, demonstrates “the extraordinary volume and the strangely compelling diversity of mass produced material culture is reordered and revalued in a surreal compendium of cultural artefacts.” 13 Much has been written by cultural theorists, particularly in the latter part of the twentieth century, on the role of desire in relation to consumption: the manner in which the desired object appears to compensate for a certain ‘lack’ on the part of the consumer - which itself may point to an anxiety about the  meaning or purpose of the world and one’s place within it. As Raymond Williams noted in the 1960’s 14 if we were “sensibly materialist, beer would be enough for us without the additional promise that in drinking it we show ourselves to be manly, young in heart or neighbourly.” This is the paradox of consumerism: that we are not, and never can be, satisfied by the acquisition of material goods. It is a paradox located at the heart of Gower’s art.

Gower’s most recent solo exhibition, ‘Cuttings from Barcelona’, at Sutton Gallery, Melbourne, 2001, has seen the artist return to her earlier motifs of translucence and transparence. In these recent works, images of gold chains and other items of jewellery cut from sales catalogues are pasted atop translucent drafting paper of the sort used by architects and engineers. Layers and veils are once again key elements – with drawn silhouettes of objects concealing images of yet other objects, in a complex web of layers that asks viewers to look ‘beyond’ and ‘through’ to find meaning.

As a last word on Gower’s art, here is an insight from Jean Fisher’s study of mysticism, which he sees as arising from “a need to express our own sense and understanding of the world for which the dominant uses and forms of language remain unbearably inadequate.” 15

“In visual art, the fiction is the veil, which again means nothing in itself since, surely, it conceals nothing more than its own fictionality. Its value for the perceiver lies in its power to activate and organise the movement of desire: our desire to know what is behind it engenders imaginative thought and knowledge. Hence knowledge is discovered not in the object but in the search, and the search can only be predicated on an a priori belief that there is something ‘lost’ to be found.”

David O’Halloran, 2002

Footnotes

1.  ‘Cabinets of Transgression: Renaissance Collections and the Incorporation of the New World’, Anthony Alan Shelton in The Cultures of Collecting edited by John Elsner and Roger Cardinal, Reaktion Books, London, 1994, p.178

2. Joanne Finkelstein, ‘To Collect or Accumulate’, Craft Victoria, Vol 25, No 228, Winter 1995, p.4

3. Walter Benjamin, ‘Unpacking my Library, in Illuminations, translated by Harry Zohn, Fontana, 1979, p. 60

4.  Elizabeth Gower has curated a number of exhibitions which look collecting including, The Retrieved Object, 2000; The Art of Collecting, 1993 and the The Art of Collecting #2, 1996

5. Christine Abrahams Gallery was then known as Axiom Gallery

6. An early collection of Gower’s ‑ coathangers - was begun whilst living with then partner Howard Arkley in a studio in Prahan which had formerly been used in the rag trade. Interestingly, Elizabeth Gower’s family owned a corner store and Gower remembers collecting Tarax labels as a child.

7.  Chantel Georgel, ‘The Museum as Metaphor in 19th Century France, in Museum Cultures: Histories, Discourses, Spectacles, ed. Daniel Sherman and Irit Rogoff, Routledge, London, 1994

8. ibid, see p.119

9. Susan Sontag, Volcano Lover, Vintage, London, 1983, p. 23

10. Ted Gott, ‘Urban Inventories’, Clemenger Contemporary Art Award, Museum of Modern Art at Heide

11.  Elizabeth Gower, ‘Chance or Design’ exhibition catalogue, p. 18, Ian Potter Museum of Art, University of Melbourne, 1995

12. Max Delaney and Jason Smith, ‘Clemenger Art Award’ exhibition catalogue, Museum of Modern Art at Heide, 1999

13. ibid

14. Raymond Williams, ‘Advertising: the Magic System’ in the Cultural Studies Reader, Simon During (ed), Routledge, London, 1993, p. 335

15. Jean Fisher, “The Echoes of Enchantment” in Inside the Visible, Ed., Catherine de Zegher, 1996. MIT Press.